Paul Ryan Really Doesn't Like Dodd-Frank

Beyond thinking Dodd-Frank generally was a bad bill, he's voted against most of its individual pieces.

The entirety of Romney's plan for financial reform in the wake of the 2008 crisis is contained in the following sentence: "Repeal Dodd-Frank and replace with streamlined, modern regulatory framework." One might argue that this is vague enough to cause some of the dreaded economic policy uncertainty, but either way it is very unclear about what exactly financial regulation should involve.

This might change with Paul Ryan. Not only is Ryan well known for his wonky style, but he voted for TARP, the Wall Street bailout. He also went to the floor of the House and asked his fellow Republicans to vote for TARP. One would imagine he would think that the status quo is flawed if he had to vote for TARP to save the economy. Alas, Paul Ryan voted against the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the major financial regulatory response to the crisis.

(It might be worth noting that Public Citizen did an analysis that found that House members who voted for TARP and against Dodd-Frank, a club Paul Ryan belongs to and consists mostly of Republicans, received three times as much campaign money from the financial industry as those that voted the opposite in both cases. As Zach Carter pointed out in an analysis back in 2010, of the 60 Republican House members who voted for TARP and against Dodd-Frank, Paul Ryan received the ninth highest donation from the financial industry in 2010, with a haul of at least $531,500 for the year.)

So Paul Ryan is against Dodd-Frank as an overall bill. He also seeks to repeal it in his budget. But what does Ryan think of the individual parts of Dodd-Frank? One could be opposed to Dodd-Frank as a whole while still thinking individual parts are good ideas. In order to isolate that question, we can look at a series of Dodd-Frank amendments Ryan voted on, as well as subsequent actions and statements.

Consumer Protection: While the bill that became Dodd-Frank was going through the House, Ryan voted to scrap the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and replace it with a plan proposed by the Chamber of Commerce. Right before Dodd-Frank came up for a vote in the House, there was an amendment proposed by Rep. Walt Minnick (D-ID) to replace the CFPA with a council of existing regulators. According to reports from the time, this was modeled off suggestions from the Chamber of Commerce. The amendment failed, though Paul Ryan voted for it. Beyond concerns of accountability or funding of the CFPB, Paul Ryan would likely rather see the entire thing go.

Derivatives Regulation: Part of Dodd-Frank requires that derivative contracts trade through a clearinghouse. We don't have a clear vote from Ryan that shows what he thought of derivatives at the time, but he did vote against the Lynch amendment. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass) proposed a simple amendment stating that a financial firm can't own more than 20 percent of a derivatives clearinghouse to prevent conflicts of interest. Later, Ryan also voted to delay the implementation of derivative regulations for one year in June 2011, signaling he doesn't approve of the aggressive derivatives reforms people like Gensler are championing at the CFTC. This contrasts him sharply with someone like John Hunstman, who had very strong derivatives reform as part of his broad, serious financial reform ideas during the Republican primary.

Resolution Authority:Ryan voted for the repeal of resolution authority -- indeed, he sponsored the legsliation to repeal it. Resolution authority, or orderly liquidation authority, is a new set of legal abilities that allow the FDIC to take over and wind down a failing financial firm. When Barney Frank says that his bill actually has a death panel in it, he's referring to this part.

We can get a bit specific with why Ryan likely did this. In his Path to Prosperity, Ryan makes two points in argument against resolution authority. The first is that it "intensiﬁes the problem of too-big-to-fail by giving large, interconnected ﬁnancial institutions advantages that small ﬁrms will not enjoy." As Barney Frank and others point out, there's not evidence that banks are actively seeking to be designated as systemically risky. The general read is that business are going out of their way to avoid that designation, even restructuring away from risky activities. Which is the point.

The second critique is that "Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) now has the authority to access taxpayer dollars in order to bail out the creditors" and will presumably use it, preserving Too Big to Fail. Depending on who is talking, this usually refers to either the FDIC’s ability to provide “an immediate source of liquidity for an orderly liquidation, which allows continuation of essential functions and maintains asset values” or its ability to repay creditors.

Dodd-Frank requires that the FDIC's responsibilities include ensuring "that unsecured creditors bear losses in accordance with the priority of claim,” that shareholders receive nothing "until after all other claims and the Fund are fully paid" and that any losses remaining afterward that could impact Treasury are repaid through assesments on systemically risky financial institutions. In order to avoid situations like AIG, the FDIC is explicitly prohibited from taking "an equity interest in or become a shareholder of any covered financial company or any covered subsidiary" during resolution. Management has to be fired. Taxpayer money is recouped and bailouts avoided.

Title II is built to avoid looking like a bailout, self-consciously so. If the critique is about the powers to differentiate payments, those powers, as Douglas G. Baird and Edward R. Morrison noted about the powers, look like critical vendor orders or other parts of bankruptcy powers. By all accounts the FDIC rules are being written in this manner.

Bankruptcy: Speaking at a town hall, Ryan has seemingly proposed modifying the bankruptcy code, perhaps in line with plans from the Hoover Institute, in order to handle financial firms. (He also seemed to endorse the Volcker Rule in that town hall, but I haven't seen that from him anywhere else.) This would mean the FDIC would lose the special powers it has been given, which are believed to be important for resolution, including advance planning and living wills, debtor-in-possession financing and liquidity, making payments to creditors based on expected recoveries, keeping operations running, having graduated regulations based on size and riskiness, the ability to transfer qualified financial contracts without termination, and the ability to turn up or down regulations going into a potential resolution based on prompt corrective action. If that is the plan, and those powers are unnecessary to tackle TBTF, Ryan should spell it out more clearly.

At the same time, Ryan has proposed policies that were already in or based on Dodd-Frank. He has told CNBC and Ezra Klein that he was interested in using Luigi Zingales' approach to taking down a financial firm as outlined in a National Affairs article. This approach uses credit default swap measures, a financial derivative designed to gauge the risk of collapse, to judge when to take a financial firm into an orderly liquidation.

As I noted at the time, this is a form of resolution authority. It is specifically a form of prompt corrective action, which requires regulators to go ahead and collapse a firm based on market signals instead of regulator judgement. For it to work, you'd need legal powers to carry out a resolution, which Ryan has voted against, as well as sufficient regulation of dervatives to make sure the price signal is clear, which Ryan also voted against. And it seems to stand in contrast to the bankruptcy approach he has talked about elsewhere.

At this point there are some allusions to specifics in what Ryan talks about when it comes to taking down a large financial firm, though it often contradicts itself. But he hasn't offered anything specific on derivatives, consumer financial protection, insurance, securitization, ratings agencies, and the shadow-banking industry more broadly -- all of which would be up for grabs if Dodd-Frank was repealed under the Path to Prosperity.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog: